FOLLOWING UP

By Joseph P. Fried

Published: March 28, 2004

In Nurse's Confession, Agonizing Echoes

For Kieran Greene of North Babylon on Long Island, the recent news that a hospital nurse had confessed to killing as many as 40 patients in New Jersey and Pennsylvania ''brought a pit to the stomach,'' as he described it.

It is not that one of Mr. Greene's relatives or friends was a victim of the nurse, Charles Cullen, whose lawyers are reported to be trying to reach a plea deal with prosecutors. But Mr. Greene's father died at the hands of another homicidal nurse in the New York region, Richard Angelo, above, who in 1989 was convicted of killing four patients at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip two years earlier.

Where Mr. Cullen has been quoted by a prosecutor as saying he killed patients with drugs ''to alleviate pain and suffering,'' Mr. Angelo said he had injected large doses of muscle relaxants into patients so that he could revive them and be seen as a hero.

Mr. Angelo was convicted of murder in two deaths, manslaughter in another and criminally negligent homicide in the fourth. He was also found guilty of assault in the case of a patient who survived. Now 41, he is in the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, serving 61 years to life.

''You never forget; you live your life, but things trigger it,'' Mr. Greene, 38, said of the memory of his father's death and its nightmarish circumstances. Anthony Greene, one of the two murder victims, was 57 and was being treated in the hospital for emphysema, his son recalled.

''You see it happens again,'' he said of the Cullen case, ''and it brings you back to that point.'' He said he viewed Mr. Angelo as having been driven by a ''loser mentality.''

Carole Scollo -- whose father, Milton Poultney, 75, of Lindenhurst, became the other murder victim as he recovered from surgery -- said she felt the need to leave Lindenhurst a decade ago.

''My father had built the house,'' Ms. Scollo, 66, said. ''It was too painful to be there.''

Of Mr. Angelo, she said from her Florida home, ''He should not be living.''

It Had a Good Beat, And a Stance to It

Paula Green tried to stop globalization with a song.

O.K., there's hyperbole here, but also history.

In 1975, Ms. Green was an owner of a small Manhattan advertising agency that had the International Ladies Garment Workers Union as a new client. Though ''globalization'' was not yet a buzzword, jobs making clothing were already being lost to overseas shops.

With the union's leaders, she developed buy-union, buy-American television commercials centered on a song whose lyrics she wrote.

''Look for the union label,'' it memorably urged, set to a catchy melody composed by Malcolm Dodds.

The song morphed into a melodic motto for organized labor generally, and was heard for years. (An even longer-lasting ad-cum-pop-culture contribution by Ms. Green dates from the 1960's, when, while with the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency, she added the words ''we try harder'' to an Avis campaign.)

Last week, Ms. Green, now retired, readily acknowledged that the ''Union Label'' song had been a good try, but ultimately a whistle in the wind as manufacturing job losses and foreign imports steadily grew.

But she said she still got a charge when the song popped up somewhere. ''It's even been used on TV sitcoms,'' she said.

And she said she relished the memory of her many years of working with the union. ''I felt particularly close to the women in the union,'' she said. ''They are real examples of women's liberation.''